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SPEAKER: Today, I am thrilled to introduce Dr. Carolyn Fornoff, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in Cornell University's Department of Romance Studies. Dr. Fornoff's work explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America with particular focus on Mexico and Central America. Her research questions how art can be used to navigate or address complex issues such as climate change. Her new book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, traces how contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted away from art's evidentiary function or its ability to prove environmental crisis and towards subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with how the world could be imagined otherwise.
During the 21st century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. In Subjunctive Aesthetics, Dr. Fornoff studies how artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future, and how they rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality or ways of being in relation to the environment through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Carolyn Fornoff.
[APPLAUSE]
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you, Hannah, for that great introduction, and thanks to all of you for being here today. It means a lot to me to see so many colleagues and friends and students. I appreciate it. So it's an honor to present to you my first single authored book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change.
My goal with this book was to analyze the aesthetic and narrative strategies that authors, artists, and filmmakers use to make sense of environmental catastrophe, and particularly situations that foreclose the possibility of future life like toxicity, extinction, and dispossession. One question that motivated me in this project was to rethink what art can do beyond the ability to simply make environmental crisis legible or visible.
We might think about this evidentiary mode as a dominant mode of the environmental arts, one that positions art as a didactic or a forensic vehicle for proving the urgency of environmental damage and that avoids ambiguity as something to be minimized in order to achieve political consensus. This ability of representation to make the invisible visible or to raise public awareness to the facts is, for example, illustrated here by this aerial photograph of the Lacandon Jungle by Mexican photographer, Santiago Arau, an image that makes deforestation immediately tangible through the stark contrast of colors and the demarcation of space.
Such pedagogical or forensic aesthetics are of course hugely valuable and do important work. They take up the task of investigating the truth and amplifying its circulation or of reconstructing past events and making sense of the senseless.
Yet, as I was surveying recent Mexican cultural production, I was struck by how many works that deal with environmental issues actually shift away from this evidentiary mandate to prove the certainty of environmental crisis and instead embrace aesthetic and narrative forms that are marked by doubt, hypothesis, and speculation.
So in this book, I call this umbrella of responses subjunctive aesthetics, and a nod to the grammatical mood that is the realm of the potential and the uncertain. Grammatical moods are usually separated into two categories, realis and irrealis. Realis, associated with the indicative, or what is, is the mood of evidence and truth. Through the indicative, a speaker confidently affirms the facticity and definitiveness of their claims.
By contrast, irrealis moods including the subjunctive indicate no such commitment to a singular or a fixed truth. The subjunctive instead encodes the speaker's uncertainty or opinionating about the state of things. It's used to respond to reality in a way that expresses its potential to change or the speaker's desire for it to change.
My book contends that by considering the subjunctive not just as a grammatical mood but as an aesthetic modality, we can better understand how contemporary cultural responses to environmental crisis mobilize doubt, contingency, and desire to dispute extractive paradigms and imagine ways of living otherwise.
Subjunctive aesthetics, I argue, can be understood as the mirror image to forensic or evidentiary aesthetics. Both respond to situations of material damage and the violent foreclosure of life, but whereas forensic aesthetics sustains an anthropological focus on witnessing and marshals evidence toward establishing a shared truth, subjunctive aesthetics tilt away from fact gathering and narrative certainty and instead toward knowledge-making practices that are motored by doubt, emotion, and the imagination.
Such responses might be thought about as modeling the Zapatista call to imagine "un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos," or "a world where many worlds might fit." I think that environmental crisis compels questions in the subjunctive about how things might but need not be. What would it take to curb global emissions, and how could the world be organized differently around life rather than around accumulation?
Thinking in the subjunctive explodes the fixity of the way things are, suggesting even against all odds, that the status quo can be changed. As Kierkegaard put it, quote, "When one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it's thought. The indicative thinks something is actual, the subjunctive thinks something is thinkable." For its ability to make things thinkable, the subjunctive has long motored the arts as the realm of imagination where reality brushes up against and is tested against ideality, hypothesis, and probability.
The linguist, Hans Busch, also explains that quote, "With the subjunctive, we always invite the listener or reader to think and to go beyond what is said or what is written." In the book, I extend Busch's framing of the subjunctive as a linguistic invitation to engage with what has been expressed to theorize subjunctive aesthetics as a form that is not didactic in aim but heuristic in its welcoming of emotional or experimental responses to a given reality. That is, the subjunctive registers uncertainty in language.
Its invocation of emotion, contingency, and the imagination is particularly useful around events that are contested or unsettled, difficult, by asking us to feel our way or debate our way through them. So you can see why the subjunctive might flourish in a moment of rising debates and uncertainty about extractivism and climate change.
The Indian novelist and theorist, Amitav Ghosh, in the Great Derangement, has also commented on the importance of subjunctive modes in the era of climate change. He writes that to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction. Rather, what fiction makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode to conceive of it as if it were other than it is.
I think this ability to think in the as if is key. Rather than see art as serving an ancillary, illustrative, or didactic role in proving environmental damage, subjunctive aesthetics make a bid for art's experimental capacity to generate alternate narratives, values, and grammars of territorial belonging.
It centers the role of desire in producing the future and mobilizes the "as if" to imagine other ways of relation. Precisely at a moment when the future seems to be predetermined, foreclosed by extractive capitalism, the subjunctive ability of art to make things thinkable enters to make those outcomes more propositional, to doubt them, fear them, opine, or emote about them and to concoct other possibilities.
Yet, I want to stress that this imaginative potential always emerges from within concrete historical circumstances and modes of production. And here I turn back to the fact that the subjunctive grammatical mood got its name because of its placement in subjoined or subordinated clauses.
The subjunctive often bridges two different subjects appearing in the dependent clause in response to conditions imposed by the main clause. It thus models relationality the way that subjects exist in reliance or subordination to one another. Extrapolated to the theorization of subjunctive aesthetics in the era of climate change, the subjunctive mood mirrors the way in which we're compelled to respond to pre-existing planetary conditions, phenomena put in motion by structures, be they economic or climatic that supersede us.
Our subordination to these determining structures indexes that regardless of how we might react to, negate, or wish the world were different, we cannot reinvent the Earth. However, we can reinvent the way in which we relate to it and to one another. So tethered to the reality of the anthropocene, subjunctive aesthetics simultaneously index our dependency on the past and present but also the possibility that we might reformulate our relationship with the more than human planet, and conjure into being other futures.
So to summarize, I used the term subjunctive aesthetics in the book to describe three intersecting trends in contemporary Mexican literature and visual art about ecological crisis. The first is a thematic concern with the foreclosure of the future by extractivist practices and carbon-intensive modernity, and the use of subjunctive rejoinders to contest the definitiveness of those foreclosures.
Second, subjunctive aesthetics are less interested in evidence and more in imaginative potential. And third, like the subordinated structure of the subjunctive grammatical mood, subjunctive aesthetics register a state of subordination and entanglement with external factors from the climatic to the economic.
Ultimately, I argue that in a context in which extractivism is continually asserted across the political spectrum as the only possible path to economic well-being and collective well-being, the subjunctive ability of art to imagine the world otherwise becomes a key means by which to express alternative formulations of how the relationship with the planet should or could be.
So in the book, I chart different manifestations of subjunctive aesthetics, and here's the table of contents. In the first chapter, I discuss environmental rewriting as a tactic, a formal tactic of subjunctive aesthetics that is used by the visual artist, [INAUDIBLE] who essentially enacts a sort of dwelling in inherited canonical texts of Mexican literature. And within those inherited structures, she performs small interventions to make them speak to the present as if they were written from the vantage of today.
In the second chapter, which is the chapter that I'll speak to you more about today, I discuss counterfactual mourning in response to the murder of land defenders which deny death as a ultimate closure and insist upon the futurity of the defender's life and political project.
In the third chapter, I look at poetry about extinction by poets including [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE], who mobilize poetry's ability to bring different things and beings into imaginative proximity through spatial contiguity as a way to reformulate human relationships with endangered life.
In the fourth chapter, I turn to cinema and I look at observational documentaries about drought and flooding in Mexico to consider how sensorial immersion operates to critique how rural resilience has been represented on screen. And finally, in the last chapter of the book, I turn to consider the conditions of production of cinema in Mexico in the era of climate change to think about experience and reimagining carbon neutral film exhibition and filmmaking through the use of solar panels and bicycles in rural Mexico.
Today, for the remainder of this talk, I'm going to narrow in on chapter 2, a case study from the book, which is titled "Land Defense and Counterfactual Mourning." Across Latin America, violence against land defenders has escalated along with the expansion of the extractive frontier, which was prompted since 2008 by a boom in global commodity prices that has encouraged administrations in Latin America across the political spectrum to intensify export-oriented extractive production.
As a result of the expansion of this extractive frontier, conflicts with affected communities have surged with these extractive companies usually supported by the state. As you can see in this chart by Global Witness, which is an NGO that tracks the murder of land defenders throughout the world, several Latin American nations have the highest rate of victims in the world and nearly a third of all documented victims are Indigenous.
In the chapter, I open with the case of Nahuatl land defender and radio broadcaster, Samir Flores Soberanes, who was murdered in his home in 2019 after months of leading the opposition to Proyecto Integral Morelos, a planned megadevelopment project that would construct a thermoelectric plant and a natural gas pipeline crisscrossing Indigenous and [INAUDIBLE] lands in Morelos.
As an organizer for the Frente de Pueblos and Defensa de La Tierra in Morelos, Flores gave voice to community objections to this pipeline and particularly the contamination risk that it posed to the local water supply. Fellow activists contend that Flores's murder was an attempt to silence opposition to this natural gas pipeline, pointing to the fact that the murder took place just days before a planned referendum on the mega project.
In the wake of Flores's murder, Indigenous and environmental activists honored his life and called attention to his death through the slogan, "Smair vive, La lucha sigue," or "Samir lives, the fight continues," spreading this rallying cry on social media and writing it on walls in cities throughout Mexico.
In my chapter, I point out that this rallying cry is a counterfactual statement. Borrowed from the Zapatista formulation, "Zapata vive, la lucha sigue," the slogan denies murder its conclusive force. It suggests that Flores's death did not have the intended impact. It did not silence dissent to the pipeline. It also suggests that his death need not have been so. Thus, the counterfactual negation of Flores's death contests the foreclosure of political dissent to extractivism by affirming the continued existence of other possible worlds, a world in which Samir Flores still lives, a world in which relations with territory are forged around consensus, relationality, and life rather than around violent utilitarianism.
So in the summer of 2021, walking around Mexico City, I began to notice "Samir Vive" graffitied and painted across the sides of buildings. And you can see it to the right there on that monument. These spectral traces of the dead in the realm of the living reinstate them as public figures. They interpolate passers by in an invitation to relation. They usually crystallize around a delimited set of characteristics which we can see here, right? The face, the name, and usually a simplified slogan.
These pared down aesthetics of remembrance echo strategies that were first popularized in the '60s and '70s in the Southern cone and the response to the politically motivated forced disappearances of political dissidents, and have since been used throughout Latin America to contest impunity.
Applied to land offender victims, the distilled visual representation simplifies highly complex localized struggles into an immediately recognizable idiom of impunity, connecting these cases of murdered land defenders with other ongoing social justice movements like Ayotzinapa and the Niunamenos movement against feminicide in Mexico.
Like the victims of feminicide, murdered land defenders are great in number and yet their deaths have a hard time gaining national recognition because of their atomized occurrence in far flung locations and because of misinformation campaigns that often criminalize victims or often misattribute their death to localized disputes or to the drug war. In this sense, the economical or even formulaic presentation of victims aims for familiarity in a move that brings to mind Susan Sontag's description of how political posters borrow from the lesson of simplicity from advertising.
Therefore, even when a passerby doesn't know the victim-- they might not be familiar with Samir-- this sort of phrasing triggers an immediate recognition. In this case, it counterintuitively identifies the dead through the counterfactual assertion of their life. Through repetition and reiterability, the slogan places the individual victim within a network of similar cases, Berta Vive, Samir Vive, Bety Vive, a discursive assemblage that figures terror as both intimate and infinitely repeatable.
Notably, it's notable to me that the purpose of these slogans graffitied in public space is not pedagogical. It doesn't teach us anything about the victim or about their specific cause. In fact, specifics are usually conspicuously absent. Instead, the goal is effective, to spark a form of mourning that negates terrors' intended eradication of space by taking up public space.
The first name addressed to the victim fosters a familiarity that is reinforced spatially through the slogan's quotidian placement, such that one encounters these names of the dead on your daily route through the city. Street art and social media campaigns that honor murdered land defenders tend to treat victims with reverence, depicting them as murderers or heroic figures.
In large part, this is an effort to counteract negative mediatic representations that tend to focus on blockades or the destruction of private property rather than the concrete complaints behind these actions-- something that happens in the United States as well. Yet, the drawback to responding to this mediatic delegitimization through hagiographic tactics, such as the halo that murdered land defenders are often endowed with which renders them murderers, is that it recurs to the model of the legitimate or ideal victim.
In her study of the legitimate victim, Sandra Walklate argues that this reductive model, albeit effective in cultivating empathy, allows only some people to be seen as deserving victims while others are viewed as undeserving victims or may never be labeled as victims at all. For example, people who negotiate with capital or labor in the extractive industry but still suffer from its effects.
Despite these caveats, ultimately, the inscription of the names of the dead powerfully restore them to public space. Visual and discursive acts of counterfactual mourning, like those we see here, refer to death but deny it as such, rerouting back to life in a subjunctivist expression of desire for how the world could have been or could still be a world in which Samir lives.
Counterfactual mourning embraces the hauntological, propelling the dead into the future through the continued affirmation of their life and the futurity of land defense. It affords the victim space in the collective imaginary. It asserts their vitality and it acknowledges the public's responsibility to them in the political projects they died defending.
Akin to an imaginative act of undoing, counterfactual mourning produces an enlarged sense of temporal possibility, correlating with a newly activist or even interventionist relationship to the past. So just as ghosts disturb this separation of the living from the dead, so too does counterfactual mourning trouble the logic of extractivism by positing other ways of being in relation to the planet, embodied in the person who fought to make it a reality.
So with what remains of my talk, I'm going to turn to a different example of counterfactual mourning in the context of land defense in performance art. This is a performance trilogy called Una Trilogia de Cuevas, A Cave Trilogy, by the Mexican performance artist, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, a three part multimedia performance series about extractivism and dispossession.
Collectively, the trilogy highlights Indigenous women's leadership and land defense in Mexico and it enacts queer alliances that are unbound by patriarchy and extractivism. These feminist counter worlds, as Rincon Gallardo describes, them are transtemporal, nourished at once by mesoamerican myth, Indigenous activism in the present, and queer theory in order to engender worlds that are quote, "opposite to the future for a future that is not yet here."
In this sense, Rincon Gallardo's speculative trilogy complements and extends the counterfactual negation of death's finality in activist phrases like "Samir Lives," by enacting what that parallel world cultivated by the undead looks and feels like. In a similar way to how urban art interventions create space for the dead by interrupting the passerby's visual field and invites their engagement, performance art also creates space for the land defender's body territory through enactments or doings of bodies brought together around shared space.
Importantly, Rincon Gallardo's trilogy centers the violence experienced by land defenders but it departs from the reverent representational modes that we were just discussing. Whereas those modes idealize land defenders in an understandable attempt to foreground their heroism and innocence, drawing on nostalgia and revolutionary ideals through the Zapata Viva mantra to appeal to the widest possible public in order to drum up support to contest impunity, but Rincon Gallardo cultivates, I think, more complex effective engagement with environmental and Indigenous activists.
In fact, the trilogy dramatizes land defense as outrageous fun, as a party. In the performance trilogy, we see queer dance parties that are soaked in drink and song. And through this revelry and this raucousness, Rincon Gallardo demonstrates how land defense is motivated by desire and it opens up a different sort of space time, a possible world that exemplifies what Jill Dolan called utopian performatives that quote, "persuade us that beyond this now of material oppression and unequal power relations lives a future that might be different."
The effect of excess that courses through the trilogy lifts the audience out of the present and into the imaginative space of the potential. In this sense, the trilogy refracts the way that land defenders are mourned in their communities as leaders in the fight for another world whose deaths are not reducible to a narrative of victimhood. Rincon Gallardo's decision to center land defenders in her performance art while also shifting away from typical moralizing representational strategies, I argue, queers environmentalist art, offering a necessary corrective to the dominant forensic focus on violence, impunity, and death, and reorienting viewers back to the vitalist life-building, world-affirming work that land defenders perform.
I suggest in my book that Rincon Gallardo theorizes joy, gathering, desire, and partying as a feminist and queer means of surviving and flourishing in times of extractivist violence. The cave trilogy originated in Rincon Gallardo's desire to honor and mourn Bety Carino, the guiding figure of the first episode, who you can see on the right hand side.
In the artist's statement for this first chapter, which is called "El Viaje De Formal, The Formaldehyde Trip," Rincon Gallardo explains that this is quote, "A twisted, mythical, critical fabulation aspiring to materialize and activate the ghost, spirit, and body of the murdered Mixtec activist, Bety Carino, who dedicated her life to the opposition to extraction projects threatening Indigenous communities." El Viaje de Formal" follows the character of Bety Carino as she travels through the underworld after her death where she is cared for and cares for fellow female warriors. And you could see sort of the kitsch DIY aesthetic that Rincon Gallardo embodies or enacts in this performance piece.
And she trains these fellow female warriors in techniques of resistance, sort of continuing to nurture this fight against dispossession even in death. In turn, these warriors then piece together Carino's dismembered body and put it back together from where it floats into cosmic space in this act of feminist recomposition.
Performance scholar, Laura Gutierrez, has pointed out that Rincon Gallardo's trilogy works in a parallel vein to Saidiya Hartman's Critical Fabulation. It's storytelling that strains to tell impossible histories. In her work about the lives of enslaved Black women, Hartman adopts this method because the historical record has obscured these stories. The impossibility of accessing them pushes Hartman to speculate about how these women's lives might have been if only she could fully imagine them.
Just as Hartman indexes the transtemporal possibilities of this exercise, which brings the past into focus without reproducing the language of violence, Rincon Gallardo draws out the reparative possibilities of encounters among women warriors across time. And she does this by configuring Bety Carino as another iteration of Coyolxauhqui, or the Aztec moon goddess who was murdered by her brother for trying to claim power.
And she does this through the costuming, right, this shiny polyester jumpsuit decked out with red tassels, plastic skull knee guards, a skull-laden belt, and blinking red nipples. Rincon Gallardo's reactivation of Coyolxauhqui through Carino articulates a transtemporal collapse or lineage of women who have been murdered for pursuing goals that flew in the face of patriarchy.
And so the whole trilogy is called The Cave Trilogy, and the cave is this really important transformative space in the performance series. Associated with the female body, sexual pleasure, and reproduction, as well as with the underworld and with sleep, in each episode, the cave is a central site of communion, refuge, and pleasure.
In this sequence from "El Viaje de Formal" after Carino's body has disintegrated, a raucous punk concert in this vaginal cave of the underworld transforms into a queer orgy. The heavy metal lyrics that are shouted by the revelers, first in Spanish and then again in English, make Rincon Gallardo's message clear. Quote, "The tomb doesn't stop us. We are not tired, disheartened. We are repeatedly dead, indomitable, illegible monsters."
The women performers rhythmically move their hands through the cave's muddy floor, sensually spreading mud on each others legs. The orgy in the mud thus illustrates the centrality of desire in land defense, how the enactment of other forms of politics is actualized through embodied desires that bring bodies into relation and contact.
So the titular cave, of course, is this transformative space where bodies can come into renewed contact as they imagine another world. In mesoamerican codices like the Mayan Popol Vuh, the seven caves are where life originated, a space of flux or transit between different times and worlds. And the historian, Federico Navarrete, has explained that ritual allowed access to this alternative, temporal, and ontological order in which there is no difference between human, nonhuman, and deity. And those that emerge from the cave in mesoamerican myth did so renewed, manifesting a new way of being and even a new historical era.
Drawing on this concept of the cave as a portal to another temporal or ontological space, a portal that is not just a temporary break from reality but rather an irreversibly transformative experience, Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy deploys performance as a counterfactual feminist realm in which to imagine new desires, alliances, and worlds beyond capitalism.
So, Rincon Gallardo's treatment of land defense through queer aesthetics like camp, irony, and frivolity makes, I think, a really important and unusual intervention into environmentalist art. As the scholar Nicole Seymour has pointed out, environmental movements have tended to eschew the flamboyant aesthetics of queer culture and have gravitated instead toward the opposite sensibility characterized by austerity, sacrifice, and self-seriousness.
While Seymour writes about the US, the same I think can be said broadly about Latin American environmentalist art, which rarely recurs to the exaggerated register and effective excess of camp. In many ways, the purported incompatibility between irreverence on the one hand and environmentalism and land defense on the other is understandable. I mean, as we have seen from the high rates of land defender murders, environmentalism is serious business.
And yet, I think that irreverent modes of mourning can really complicate and complement these mainstream representational modes by preventing violence from being sublimated into trauma or spectacle, and by instead pivoting back out toward desire. And this is the case, I think, with this is the third installment of The Cave Trilogy called "Opossum Resilience, Resiliencia Tlacuache," in which the opossum is used to mirror Zapotec lawyer and anti-mining activist, Rosalinda Dionicio's brush with death in 2012 when paramilitary forces linked to the Minera Cuscatlan-- a Mexican mining affiliate of the Canadian transnational company, Fortuna Mines-- ambushed her vehicle. And in the vehicle with her was another anti-mining activist and Zapotec leader, Bernardo Vazquez Sanchez, who was killed in the attack.
But the bloodied Rosalinda Dionicio, who was shot twice, survived the attack by pretending that she was dead. And so you can see why Rincon Gallardo chose the opossum who was famous for playing dead to outwit predators. And the opossum here embodies this resilience and miraculous resurrection.
The opossum is also a trickster. It's the deity of drunkenness and thievery. In mesoamerican myth, the opossum appears as a creature who brings humanity corn and fire, pilfering these life forces from the gods and bringing them down to Earth to humans. This unfolding of Dionicio, who does not appear on screen in this episode, through the figure of the opossum, avoids flattening her into the role of idealized hero or passive victim. Instead, it positions her as an activist who risks her life in defense of Zapotec territory but also as a picota, or sort of a playful picaresque figure who relentlessly undermines her foes.
The ludic and playful representation of Dionicio as an intoxicated trickster reorients viewers' understandings of land defense not just as serious business, but also compatible with pleasure, playfulness, and indulgence. Land defense here is outrageous fun, or as the opossum sings-- there we go-- as the opossum sings in a scene where it's drinking from the agave plant, and "En tiempos de despojo, que no haga falta el tepache, in times of dispossession, may tepache not be scant. Tepache is a fermented beverage, alcoholic beverage, derived from pineapples.
In mobilizing desire and playfulness, Naomi Rincon Gallardo Cave Trilogy actualizes Eve Tuck's point that we must resist reducing disenfranchised communities to the experience of damage and pain. Instead, The Cave Trilogy teases out the complexity of life lived in the extractive zone in which pain, rage, joy, and desire intermingle.
These affects animate land defense, revealing it to be a collaborative project that's sustained by dreams for a better future and memories of a shared past. Tuck elaborates on desires qualities. Quote, "Desire is involved with the not yet, and at times, the not anymore. It has a ghostly remnant quality not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing. It's about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future."
So following Tuck desires both speculative and hauntological, it's the discovery of possibilities, the charting of paths for future action, the embrace of alternatives over certainties, and the excess that courses alongside and throughout the experience of the real.
So to conclude, if violence against land defenders is a strategy through which to forcibly impose extractivism as the only way of relating to land, a form of relating that forecloses others by contaminating water, eradicating habitats and so on, counterfactual practices of mourning like Samir Vive and Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy refuse that foreclosure as definitive and affirm the futurity of post-extractivist forms of inhabiting territory.
I think that it's notable that counterfactual aesthetics of mourning do away with the evidentiary function that we so often associate with works about impunity. Perhaps this is because violence against land defenders is a trauma that is not confined to the past, but it's ongoing and constitutive of extractivist modernity.
As a result, counterfactual practices of mourning are actually not usually oriented toward the state or the justice system at all, as is the case in the post-dictatorial context or even in other contexts of mourning in Mexico, like the [INAUDIBLE] or Ayotzinapa massacres, which are sort of containable and thus redressable as events.
The purpose of a counterfactual mourning exceeds what the state can or is willing to do, and it exceeds the scope of any singular case or any individual case that might be brought to trial. Rather, I suggest that the work performed by counterfactual mourning is imaginative and future-oriented, and its invitation to join in the subjunctive act of enacting other possible worlds that might exist beyond extractivism and its corollaries of violence and dispossession, worlds in which people engage with territory on the basis of life, community, joy, and desire.
The succinct counterfactual assertion of life in the face of death, and slogans like "Samir de Vive" identifies that the stakes of public mourning lie not just in visibility or proof or the pursuit of justice, but in imagining a world that persists beyond extractivism, a counterfactual world where Samir Flores and Bety Carino still live, a world sustained by those who keep their memory and desires alive.
Similarly, the raucous and sensual parties enacted in Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy create this space where those who are dispossessed and coalesce in a gesture that refuses death. This subjunctive potential of art to create spaces and forms of signification that imagine beyond what is, echoes the work that is performed by land defenders themselves, who treat the future as a territory to be defended. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation. We're going to open the room up to questions both here in the room and on Zoom. So if you have a question, just raise your hand and I'll pass the mic on to you.
AUDIENCE: First of all, congratulations on this amazing book and thank you for a wonderful talk. I wonder if you could just share with us some of the reception of the art. And I'm curious to know if the irreverence and that kind of punk rock aesthetic that I see here angers people, or just-- yeah, if you could just speak to the reception of the work.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah. I mean, I think that part of the reason I wanted to combine these two examples in this chapter is that they really speak to different publics. So you know, these performance pieces are typically only available to see in art museums. They are performance works that were recorded. The very first one debuted in SF MoMA. So if that gives you an idea of the intended audience or the original intended audience, and so they're doing sort of different work for different publics, which I'm interested in, right?
And so I do think that the importance of appealing to a broad public through sort of here, we see like revolutionary imagery that recalls the Mexican Revolution. It brings the Zapatista revolution to mind. And it's doing sort of this work of amalgamating political issues into this the figure of the singular land defender in a way that will help sort of a general public be sympathetic to their claims, or potentially be sympathetic to their claims. Whereas this sort of work is not appealing to the general public. And I think it's pretty disinterested in the general public, which allows it to perform different work. And yet, it also restricts it in some ways from reaching that broader public or creating those tensions.
But when I've taught this piece in the past, I think a thing that causes students in trouble with dealing with it is that DIY, like, low-res aesthetic. And so it doesn't neatly sit within the high art world either.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Congratulations on the book. It's amazing. I think I'm so glad to be here and to hear you talk about it. Maybe, can we go back to the image with the graffiti? Because I'm wondering, when I'm looking at it and I see a little bit the contrast between that monument-- which I'm assuming is the monument-- and the graffiti. And it kind of made me think about, I love the idea of counterfactual mourning. And I'm just wondering about the lastingness of that mourning, you know? Because you have that monument that, in a way, I mean, I don't know what he's saying or what he's doing, but I am assuming it's commemorating something in that more official permanent way. Whereas the graffiti has that ability to appear and disappear.
So I'm just wondering if there is something about how long does this counterfactual mourning last? And if there is an end, and if there is something after that end that gives us another sense of those futures that you're talking about.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you. It's a great question. I think that, I mean, the temporality is, it's more ephemeral. And yet, it is surprisingly lasting, particularly given the quantity of cases. Now, there are only certain cases that really achieve this broader circulation and resonance. So we might think about in Honduras, the case of Berta Caceres, right? Or both Samir Vive, which continues to be quite prominent even though he was murdered in 2019.
Yeah, so it's not a long lasting monument. It is more ephemeral. And I think that then the internet becomes this space where some of these discourses become sort of archived. But it's true. It is particularly in contrast with the monument that is there in this permanent official way. The counterfactual mourning does have a shorter timeline.
AUDIENCE: Carolyn, that was so wonderful and so refreshing because I find evidentiary pedagogical environmental art so boring. And it's just everywhere. I have a question that actually relates to the question was asked last, the relationship. The subjunctive capacity to grasp long time. So I'm thinking, like, because environmental degradation and extractive is both, like, long in the making and also well lasts-- like, you know, thinking of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence, right? And the subjunctive capacity to grasp this kind of almost inhumane temporality of environmental degradation.
Yeah, because it has itself, also in the grammatical mode, has a really different interesting relationship to time and to the future. But environmental degradation has this both long future and long past, this due past. And so I was just curious in relation to that, and also, congratulations.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no. I mean, I'm totally obsessed with the question of time and environmental aesthetics. The first volume that I got a chance to co-edit is called Timescales, Ecological Temporalities Across Disciplines. And I think that the subjunctive is doing something different. It's not so much interested in collapsing timescales, although you might-- like, I do suggest that in this in this piece, there is this interest in this radical collapse of timescales into sort of this mode of simultaneity.
But the subjunctive as a grammatical mood, and I think as an artistic mood, is interested in this departure from the now or this departure from the historical archive into sort of this other space, this space of the possible. And I'm not sure what that-- what's the temporality of the possible? I don't know. It's a great question. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Congratulations, and that was fabulous. I'm very interested in how you move from this attention to the linguistic, the tense, and turn it into a methodology. That is fascinating and I really appreciate that. I wanted you to talk a little bit more about what you were saying here and what she just asked about, the uses of the past, right? How these works are citing or reusing the past even in this [SPANISH], it is just in that, recycling and reusing the Zapatista slogan.
And even though that is in Morelos, which makes sense of course, as the homeland of Zapata. Here, in this piece, there's a collapse of different Indigenous references, right? You talked about Maya, but the Coyolxauhqui Aztec, and nothing to do with the present of the Zapotec people who are at work here.
So is there-- what do you think about that use of a homogeneous indigeneity, of a collapsing of an Indigenous past with the living people that are defending these territories? What do you think about those uses of the past?
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly-- there is something problematic to the collapse of the particularity and the specificity of different Indigenous cosmologies into this sort of idiom of speculative indigeneity, right, that this artist is interested in. And it's important to note that she is a Mestiza artist as well, right? So she is not herself Indigenous, which I think is telling.
But I do think-- so in that sense, I guess that she's in that same lineage as folks equally problematic perhaps, like Gloria Anzaldua and other Chicana thinkers who have turned back to, like, shall we write as sort of this figure of feminist undoing and repair?
So, yeah, I think that there is something problematic that is happening there. And honestly, like with these two, where there's the absence of the pedagogical. It's productive in many ways, but it's also problematic in others because there's a total erasure of what exactly who this person is. What are the specificities of their fight? And it sort of collapses the individual into this idiom of impunity. And so it's a risky move. I feel I find it both generative and problematic.
AUDIENCE: Congratulations again. I did love your book. I saw it as a good model not only to think about Mexico and cultural production in the connection with climate change, but also to think about beyond Mexico, thinking about Latin America. One of the things that you mentioned at the beginning, you just quoted Amitav Ghosh. And in Ghosh, what he says, you know, his indictment of realist fiction, the way that realist fiction has not really dealt with climate fiction. He says there is an exception which is not realistic, which is speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction has dealt with climate change with fiction fantastica, sci-fi. But he says, I'm not going to focus on that. I'm not going to concentrate on that. And when you talk about the possible, the subjunctive, it is also the speculative. And you say some of these works speculate. But I'm trying to quote you, but you said something like, but I am not going to do speculative fiction, which is different from, for example, la companhia seems to me, a speculative fiction. So I just was wondering about your conscious decision not to focus on a genre that would give you lots of texts and work on dealing with climate fiction.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah. Thank you so much, Edmundo. I think-- so first of all, Amitav Ghosh has not read Latin American literature. That's all I have to say, because there's a long tradition in Latin American literature of realist literature that does deal with climate crisis. In my class, we're reading all of it. La [SPANISH], right? All these novels that-- or La Novela de la Tierra, La Novela de la Selva, realist fiction galore that deals with environmental crisis. So Amitav Ghosh needs to read, needs to come to my class and read realist fiction.
But actually, I confess that I began this project as a project about speculation, and then I decided it was too narrow, that the objects that I wanted to talk about were not always speculative fiction. And so, as a sort of a means of expanding the project and thinking beyond the limitations of genre, because I mean, I think you can say that this is speculative fiction. But I wasn't sure how exactly to make that case, so I was thinking you know, instead of putting them into a genre, why not talk about what they're doing, which is to me, activating the subjunctive mode?
And I think that forms across multiple forms of cultural production can activate the subjunctive mode without necessarily being in that speculative genre. But yes, it is sort of this thing that I deal with in the introduction, where I say, the subjunctive encompasses the speculative but it also goes beyond the speculative.
AUDIENCE: Carolyn, thank you so much for the talk and congratulations. Super excited to read the book and have you sign it. So, my question kind of gestures more to your use of desire and how you talk about it as kind of, from what I heard, like, a fight for another world, a desire for defense of the land, and a desire to think of worlds beyond capitalism, right?
And then I was thinking about like the erotic in land art desire, and thinking of the artist's work, of Naomi's work and her performance, and reflecting on previous works of art like in the land art genre, like Ana Mendieta, and how she does a lot of, like, nude work where she's directly kind of interacting or encountering the land, and also thinking about-- I forget this artist's name, but like a walk on the land where he, like, walks barefoot. That's his performance, just walking barefoot on the land.
So I was kind of curious as to how you would read the costumes in these performances, if it's sort of a-- because you also talked about queering environmental art and interrupting the gaze. So thinking about how this is queering environmental art in such a way, like, queering the tradition of environmental art through the use of costumes and an interruption of the gaze on, like, on the body, like directly on the body and its interactions with the land.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm just curious as to how you read the use of costumes and, like, engagement with the land in this work.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think that-- I mean, the costumes are a key part of this trilogy and there are all these DIY sort of recycled materials. So we see, like, the plastic water jugs on her head as part of her headdress, and this insulation tube.
Each episode has this nawale, or animal spirit, right? It's the axolotl, the hummingbird, and the opossum. And Rincon Gallardo herself donned these costumes. And they all have this sort of papier maché, like, thrown together DIY aesthetic. And she's talked a lot about how she's inspired by B-movies from the '80s and '90s of these really trashy, like, sci-fi films.
And so, in that way, it's very different from sort of the, like, somber walking barefoot or nude repose in the land, which is equally valid like forms of thinking about body territory together, or like the human body is not separate from but integrated into the landscape. But yeah, I mean, it's doing something more irreverent that I find refreshing.
AUDIENCE: Carolyn, congratulations. When you mentioned the subjunctive mood, you also say words as possibility, as alternative realities. And I was thinking about other term that came to my mind, utopia, which is a term that I find a lot in conversations about the climate crisis, environmental issues nowadays.
So, how do you relate to that term, to utopia? Do you find it useful, productive? How does the subjunctive mode relate to utopianism?
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah, that's a great question, Illiana. I mean, like particularly in this piece, like, utopia is very much present. But I don't feel tied to the concept of utopia. And so, particularly, because often for me, like, my analysis is driven by works that are intriguing to me. And often, these works are not performing utopia.
And so I wanted to allow for that multiplicity of feelings, like La Compania, which articulates more of a dystopia. But to bring all of these, what I think of as a representative sampling of some of the most interesting works that are performing, this imaginative call.
AUDIENCE: I'm going to let a grad student reply.
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Very kind.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Congratulations, Carolyn. So my question goes in the sense that as I understand that the subjunctive aesthetics do complicate our notions or preconceptions of time, right, and possible futures, et cetera. But since these works are grounded-- pun intended or not-- in the land itself, in the territory, the landscape, I was wondering if you also see in the works that you analyze a complication of space itself. And for example, if there is a idealized vision of the land or the landscape, or if you find there to be a complication of the notion of space as much as there is one of time?
CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah. I mean, I think definitely, there are copious, abundant environmentalist artworks that idealize space. And I'm thinking of my fourth chapter, the rural resilience film, where I look at films like [SPANISH], which is this observational documentary about the desert where the gaze-- I sort of take that film to task for promoting a gaze that's romanticized of rural hostility and of rural resilience in the face of the hostility of drought.
And so it's actually in chapter 4 where I sort of complicate this idea that subjunctive aesthetics is always doing something generative. I think that subjunctive aesthetics can also be a way to think about how nostalgic or romanticized views of the engagement with land can sort of perpetuate sort of reductive ideas about ways to exist in relation to territory, particularly when they're objects like Rincon Gallardo, like this observational documentary that are meant for consumption by people who do not live in these spaces.
And so I talk in that chapter about the reception of some of these arthouse observational documentaries by global north audiences, who then sort of get this idea that, OK, it's really hostile. Drought is worsening, but you know, these people are surviving. And so in that chapter, I sort of think about some of the potential problems and pitfalls of the sensorial immersion in the idealized landscape.
[APPLAUSE]
During the twenty-first century, Mexico has engaged in the incongruous behavior of positioning itself a leader in the fight against climate change while simultaneously escalating its extractions, according to Carolyn Fornoff, assistant professor of Latin American Studies. In a Chats in the Stacks book talk Fornoff discusses her new book, "Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) which explores how contemporary Mexican writers, filmmakers, and visual artists have reacted to this contradiction, envisioning alternative ways of being in relation to the environment, not just as it is, but as it could or should be.
